The Stone Flower Garden

by Deborah Smith

  His face tightened. “No. Please let me—”

  “You could have come to me. You could have told me about yourself. I’d have understood.”

  “I know that now.”

  My shoulders sagged. “Please promise me you won’t tear up this garden.”

  “I can’t promise you that. I came here thinking that digging up this land is a crazy plan, and maybe it is, but I’ll follow it through.”

  He’ll dig up everything. He’ll find Clara, and believe the wrong answer. “If you find evidence that someone else killed Clara, what will you do?”

  His eyes filled with cold determination. “I’ll track the bastard down and put him in prison. Isn’t that what you’d want? Wouldn’t you help me?”

  I swayed. If I’d had any doubts about his goals or his passion, it vanished. He wanted revenge, justice, a pound of flesh. Hardigree flesh, if he knew. “My grandmother is sick, and old. So is Matilda. If you’d just wait—”

  “Until they die?” I nodded. He stared at me grimly. “You’re saying the gossip I might stir up is more important to them than finding out who really killed Clara? Look, I know there was no love lost between Swan and Clara, but deep down your grandma’s got to want to know what really happened to her sister.”

  I felt as if my skin were separating from my bones. “I support what you have to do for your family. But I don’t support your plan.”

  He took another step toward me, the tension hanging thicker in the air, his eyes boring into me. “You think my pa did it. That’s it, isn’t? You’re afraid he did it. And you can’t let yourself be with me if this is true.”

  I stared at him. “I’d never, never—”

  “You’re a bad liar, Darl. I see it in your eyes. You’re hiding something. And that’s it. That’s the only thing that makes sense. You’d have to turn your back on me if I proved my pa really killed Clara. You’d have to uphold the Hardigree reputation. Is that it?”

  “Please don’t make any assumptions about me. You barely know me.”

  “What the hell else am I supposed to think? Goddammit, talk to me.” He strode down into the garden, across Clara’s grave, and up the slope to me with furious speed. Before I could back away he caught me in his arms. I braced my hands against his chest, pushing, pulling, in agony. “Barely know you?” he echoed. “Don’t you ever say that to me again. You know that’s not true.”

  “I can’t help you, I can’t give you my blessing, I can’t . . . go on with you the way we were in Florida. It’s not the same, now.”

  “Don’t let Swan keep hold of you. What has she done to you? Has she twisted you so much that you are turning into her? The girl I knew—hell, the woman I knew in Florida—would never turn her back on me. Is this about protecting the Hardigree name? You’re a Hardigree, so you can’t love me unless I’ve got the right pedigree? I can’t believe it.”

  “I do love you,” I said. “I’ll love you all my life.”

  “Darl.” He searched my eyes, lifted a hand to my face, stroked his thumb roughly, lovingly across my cheek. Imprinting me, my words, on his skin. We were both on the verge of tears. A bell began to ring in the distance—the old bell that Matilda had used to call Karen and me to the house when we roamed.

  “I have to go. Dear God, just let me go.”

  He slowly released me and stepped back. “This isn’t over. I’m not goin’ to let you give up on happiness the way your grandmother’d have you do. Whatever else is drivin’ you, I’ll dig that up, too.”

  Those words tore at me along with the peeling of the old brass bell. I was being split in two. I backed up the slope. “Don’t ever ask me to meet you here again. It’s haunted.”

  “I love you.”

  I shook my head. “You can’t.”

  We were haunted, too.

  William stood at the top of the back terrace, among the marble swans. And standing beside him, posed in the fading light of the day, golden brown and beautiful in simple black slacks and a sweater, Karen saw me come out of the woods. For the first time in twenty-five years, my beloved cousin ran down the terrace steps to hug me.

  She had no idea.

  When I ushered Karen into Swan and Matilda’s hospital room I noticed a new IV unit next to Matilda’s bed. The device’s long, thin tube ran to a needle taped to her right forearm. She napped under the utilitarian bedcovers, and suddenly I saw her as she was: a thin, sick old woman with fuzzy gray hair. Karen halted in the center of the room with her hands over her mouth and shock in her eyes. Swan lounged like a pale empress in the other bed, a small book of haiku poetry open in her hands. She still wore her own IV line, and an oxygen tube remained attached across her face. Her white hair streamed over the shoulders of a fresh silk gown and robe I’d brought her. She looked tired, but her blue eyes bored into Karen mercilessly. “Karen,” she said in a strong voice. “Don’t overreact. You’ll do her no good.”

  I stared at Matilda with fear pulsing in my throat. “What’s happened since I was here this morning?”

  “Some tests showed a little trouble with her heart function. The doctors have put her on some new medications.”

  Karen walked unsteadily to Matilda’s bedside. “Grandmother?” Matilda stirred, opened her eyes, and uttered a low, keening sound. Karen sat down beside her on the bed. “Grandmother.” Matilda held up trembling arms. Karen swept her up in a convulsive embrace. As the soft, muffled sounds of their crying emerged, I sat down stiffly in a chair near Swan’s bed. Our eyes met. I leaned close and whispered bitterly, “I know about the Rakelow Inn. And I know about Leon’s job.”

  Swan’s face remained impassive except for a wicked gleam of humor that rose in her eyes. She picked up an extra pillow she’d been using as an arm rest, pushed it toward me, and asked in a soft, mocking tone, “Tempted to put this over my face?”

  “Yes.” Her amusement faded. Across from us, Karen and Matilda continued to hold each other and sob. Swan and I would never hug, never cry on each other’s shoulders. “I’ll do whatever you want,” I whispered. “But leave everyone else out of it.”

  She looked at me with dull victory, and nodded.

  Outside a motel on the edge of town, a crowd gathered that night. “Stay back,” Eli told Mama and Bell. “We don’t know these folks. They may be blamin’ us for Swan and Matilda’s sickness, like I warned you.” Eli stepped outside the simple, one-story building, facing a parking lot full of old cars, pickup trucks, and motorcycles. Several dozen rough-hewn men and stalwart women stood there. Stonecutters and their wives. Leon walked out of the crowd. “We brought you something to take back to your daddy’s gravesite in Tennessee,” he said. Eli exhaled with relief then called Mama and Bell outside. The three of them watched as the people parted around a small trailer. On it sat a tall marble monument with the most beautiful hand carving Eli had ever seen.

  Jasper Wade

  Husband

  Father

  Stonecutter

  Rest in peace and justice

  “We gave you these words from the heart,” Leon said. “You’ll have to make ’em come true.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  As Karen and I left the hospital lobby after a visit the next morning the information ladies gaped at us, and two of them hurried over. “Kare Noland,” they exclaimed in unison. “Cassandra. We love you on the show. Your grandmother is so proud.” I stood watching her graciously give the two white-haired white ladies her autograph, and I watched them thank her. “Does Grandmother really talk about me?” she asked, as we walked outside. We sat down in a meditation garden of azaleas and marble benches. A marble plaque proclaimed the garden a donation of Hardigree Marble.

  I nodded. “She told me she never misses an episode. I’ve heard that people stop her on the street to discuss your character’s storylines. She loves discussing you.” We s
tepped into the meditation garden and went to the bench there. In that small, private world Karen hunched forward and said quietly. “My contract’s up. I’ve told my agent I’m leaving the show. I’ve already taped my last scenes.” She shrugged. “Cassandra lives on. They’ve already got a new actress to play her.” She raised her hands. “So I’m not going to be a celebrity for much longer.”

  I absorbed this morbid information with a puzzled frown. “Why are you giving it all up?”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  I waited two beats, then asked calmly, “How far along are you?”

  “Just two months.”

  “You love the baby’s father?”

  “No, and he’s made it clear he doesn’t want to be a father. Just as well. He’s trash.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “Not unless you keep up with gangster rap.”

  “What happened?”

  She stared at the marble walkway beneath our feet. “Looking for love in all the wrong places. Who knows? I’ve got money. I look good. I could go white or black, upscale or downtown—you know, I have my choice of men. I just can’t seem to find one of any color who’s worth it.” Her face stilled. She bit her lip and looked away. “Being a mother is the first thing that’s made sense.”

  “You need to tell your grandmother.”

  “I don’t know how. She always wanted me to be above reproach. Pure class. Lena Horne.” Karen laughed wearily. “I can’t be Lena Horne. She’s Lena Horne. So I guess I’ll just be a glamorous unwed mother.” She bent her head in her hands.

  Slowly, I eased an arm around her shoulders. “Maybe you should start looking for love where it’s simple, and where it will always be. Right here.”

  She straightened. We shared a fragile, searching pinpoint of emotion, then a tide of relief. “I’ve missed you, you fool,” she whispered.

  We tilted our heads together. “I’ve missed you, too.”

  Leon emerged from the hospital in the company of several men. We watched as he held a conversation with them. Stonecutters. White and black, a mixed group united in one trait—they listened with obvious deference and respect to whatever he was saying. I expected he was talking to them about Eli, and my heart twisted. “That’s Leon Forrest,” I whispered. “Do you remember him?”

  Karen straightened, gave me a stunned look, then gazed at him. “Leon,” she said softly.

  Leon turned, scanning the garden casually, and saw us. We stood. His face went blank when he realized who Karen was, as if everything he knew about himself had suddenly deserted him and had to be reinstated one piece at a time. “Karen?” he said in a deep voice simmering with pleasure and disbelief. She walked over to him and held out a perfect hand. I watched Karen look up into Leon’s somber, scarred face and I saw how he looked down at her. He clasped her hand like fine china between his big palms. They barely moved, they barely spoke. They traded welcomes, they traded lives.

  Look what’s happening to them. The slow prickle on my spine and the tears burning behind my eyes said my cousin was finding her way home with unerring instinct. I couldn’t ruin that for her. Instead I mourned everything that had gone wrong in my own life. I thought of Eli, and ached for what we’d never have.

  Eli woke, sweating, in an elegant bedroom in a fine new queen-sized bed with designer sheets and feather pillows, courtesy of the decorator who’d filled out an Esta House called the Broadside. The Broadside covered an entire large corner on two handsome, oak-shaded back streets in Burnt Stand. An Asheville executive and his wife—friends of Swan’s—had retired there, but both had died in recent years, leaving their scattered children to sell the villa-like house with its marble porticos and piazzas, its chandeliered rooms and European antiques. The children—like the other mostly absentee owners of the other empty, expensive Esta Houses in Burnt Stand—had been very happy to receive a check for the full price, with no questions asked.

  Mama and Bell had settled with Bell’s baby in pretty bedrooms sporting private balconies and whirlpool tubs in giant bathrooms. Bell spent hours every night on a phone in the house’s library, talking to her psychic or her husband, Alton. Every night, crying, she promised Alton they would all come to their senses soon.

  “You have to let Mama do this alone. It’s about her pride, we’re her children, and we’ve been wronged, so she has to stand up for us.” Bell said all that in a hissed whisper as she clutched Eli’s arm and held him still. He chewed his tongue and tried not to walk after Mama, who was slowly making her way toward the hospital lobby’s elevators. Mama gazed up at the board of directors’ portraits, stopping before the elegant, gilt-framed paintings of Swan and Matilda. Modest and deliberately plain in a brown wool suit with soft brown loafers, Mama set her mouth and looked up at them firmly. She made Eli think of a determined gray-haired mouse gazing up at two languid cats.

  “Can’t do it,” he announced to Bell. “Can’t let her meet with Swan alone. Wait here with little Jessie. I’m going with Mama.”

  “Brother, you stop it, stop, don’t you—” An elevator door opened as Bell tugged furiously on Eli’s long arm. To his surprise, Darl stepped out. She was dressed in trim gray slacks and a soft white sweater. She’d put her hair up in some kind of clasp, trickling a fine brunette strand or two over her forehead. The lovely shape of her, the sleek look of her, the tormented yet aloof set of her face all filled Eli with helpless wanting, angry and sad. Her stark blue gaze went from him and Bell to Mama, where it warmed into a troubled welcome. “I heard you asked to see my grandmother,” she said to Mama.

  “I’ve got a bone to pick with her,” Mama answered. “I’m sorry, Darl, I know she’s sickly, and I won’t visit long, but I sure do have to speak my piece.”

  “About the problem at the Rakelow Inn?”

  Mama nodded. “Nobody tells my children they’re not good enough to stay somewhere. I’m hopin’ your grandma’s just sick and not thinkin’ right, treatin’ my family that way.”

  “No, she knew exactly what she was doing, and there’s no excuse for it. You, Bell and Eli—” her eyes moved to Eli’s, then Bell’s briefly—“have my heartfelt apology. You all don’t have to live in a house in town. I’m inviting you all to please move your things to Marble Hall. As my guests.”

  Mama gaped at her. So did Bell. When Darl met Eli’s eyes, he knew he looked angry but her offer had gotten to him. He shook his head slightly. “Please,” Darl repeated.

  “I appreciate it,” he answered. “But we’re set up at a good house in town. We don’t need the charity.”

  “Eli,” Bell hissed. And Mama scowled at him.

  Darl seemed to flinch, and it tore at him. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  Mama patted her arm. “We know that. Thank you kindly, but I’d just like to have my say with your grandma.”

  “All right. I’ll go up with you.” Darl turned to leave, guiding Mama into the elevator with one hand gently on her shoulder. Once inside the elevator, Darl looked back at Eli. “Take care of her,” he commanded in a low voice. She nodded.

  And yourself, he added silently, as the doors closed.

  Annie Gwen was the widow of the man we had killed, Jasper Wade, Karen’s full blood uncle and the son of Anthony Wade, whom Matilda had dearly loved. That was how I silently presented Annie Gwen Wade to Swan and Matilda—as a kinswoman and a symbol, a woman wronged by her own family. Which included us.

  Matilda welcomed her politely but said little, rigid with dignity even while encased in a hospital bed. Swan lay back with the pose of a monarch receiving a courier from a poorer country. Annie Gwen and I stood between the beds. I stayed by her side. She kept her head up. “I didn’t come here to do you wrong,” she said to Swan. “And I expect fair treatment from you in return. You were always fair to me, before.”

  “Annie Gwen,” I interjected before Swan c
ould speak, “no one was fair to you and your family twenty-five years ago. You deserve an apology for the way my Great-Aunt Clara misrepresented Anthony Wade’s history in this town. And for the way my grandmother turned her back on your family.” I paused. “Then, and now.”

  Swan gazed at me with icy warning over the oxygen tube that still rimmed her lower face. Then she looked at Annie Gwen. “Everything about the situation was chaotic. I do regret how it was all handled. Just as I regret giving the owner of the Rakelow Inn the impression the other day that your family was not welcome in this town. I assure you, he misunderstood my anxiety. I merely asked him about your lodgings.”

  I waited one second for the drama of that lie to sink in. “That’s not true. Many of my grandmother’s out-of-town guests stay at the Rakelow. She’s responsible for a sizable amount of the Inn’s income. She told the owner she didn’t want your family there, and he evicted you.”

  This blunt rebuttal stiffened the room’s air and made Swan’s face a little paler. Annie Gwen didn’t seem to know how to deal with my dark honesty any more than Swan’s cool silence. Finally she said, “Mrs. Samples, you owe me and my children an apology.”

  “I most certainly do apologize,” Swan said, giving me a bitter retaliatory glare. Then, to Annie Gwen, “You’ve gotten on with your life, I understand. From what I hear, Eli has done very well for himself. Your daughter is well married. You have a lovely grandchild. You’ve been blessed.”

  Annie Gwen frowned. “My family’s come out of hard times pretty well, due to hard work and good hearts.”

  “Then why pursue something so sad about the past that it can only hurt us all?”

  “We just want the truth about my Jasper. This notion about the land hiding some secret is my daughter’s pain talking, and I know it sounds awful silly, but maybe the Lord sent us here for other purposes, and we have just have to figure out what those purposes are.”

  Matilda, who had become increasingly restless as Annie Gwen spoke, pressed a frail hand to her heart. “I believe I can tell you one good purpose we can all serve. The Stand Tall project.” The air froze. Swan’s expression said this was a rare time when Matilda had surprised her and defied her. “I speak for Swan,” Matilda said, “when I say we’d consider it an honor if you’d participate.”